Am I Missing Something?

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

I was forced to watch this in one of my college classes, big surprise. For me, i thought that this film was horrible. This is not a documentary because it doesn't give both sides of the issue, that's what "big noise films" is known for. If you are a radical-liberal, socialist and/or are studying social movements and uprisings, then there is a good chance you will like it. The film shows social uprisings in impoverished areas of horrible countries. It is framed in the classic propaganda fashion, by using violent/moving images, words, and taking quotes out of context, among other things. So when you watch this, be thinking or remembering that there are two sides to the argument, and that most people in the world want to be in this country. Also be ready to see some pretty messed up images.

The Fourth World War is another earnest effort by filmmakers to underline the severe social and economic injustices that continue to escalate, not decrease, around the world. Seven years after this film was made, it seems to me that not much has changed. Despite the titanic struggles of dispossessed peoples around the world, the wealth of nations continues to reside in fewer and fewer hands. The economies of poor countries collapse under vicious IMF policies, and capitalism's global 'clubs' thrive ever and ever upward. Meanwhile, people keep struggling, ultimately downward.The depressing thing is that the world does not get better because of documentaries like this. There are miniscule victories here and there, but the world carries on as it has always carried on: the rich just get richer, and the poor keep fighting uphill battles. I've been on the streets many times over four decades, demonstrating against the rape of the world by global capitalism. A lot of people think it's healthy to ventilate, but it's ultimately futile: if demonstrations brought governments down, they'd be outlawed. The democracy we live with is a myth.This is a necessary film, but it just reminded me of bloody depressing it all is.

Really it's an extremely one sided view of the many confrontations in the world, trying to tie the knot that links corporations to poverty, and how it's all ultimately a battle between the haves and the have nots. It doesn't quite help that the poetry is a little on the high school side. Michael Moore does a better job of being one sided while seeming to be righteous.The documentary simply suffers from having too many subjects. Every revolution shown was just skimming the surface. The producers knew that too, which is why the Palestine conflict had just less than 10 minutes of screen time. With a more narrow focus and some balanced reporting, this could have been good.It would be better to just watch Fahrenheit 911 or some Noam Chomsky documentary - power and terror - is good.

This film is a look at "the fourth world war", the global resistance of the working people of the world against the war being made on us by the owners of the world. It covers the last few years of this resistance, from the general strike of workers in South Korea, to the resistance to launching the war against Iraq.The documentary is made by the same group which made the excellent documentary "This is What Democracy Looks Like", and like that movie the producers say they are indebted to Indymedia and activist groups for their help in making this. Like that film, this one pretty much lets events speak for themselves - as in that movie, you are in the streets with the people struggling, this time not in Seattle, but in Mexico, Palestine, Korea, Argentina, South Africa and so forth.There is a gut-wrenching scene of doctors in Jenin trying to save a little girl whose body was completely shot up by Israeli soldiers, and then her father crying over her dead body. One thing that occurred to me while watching this is that this is that I would absolutely never see this on the US corporate media. My tax dollars are what paid for the bullets who shot that little girl, as are every US citizen taxpayers, which is why the existence of such things is completely absent from all that you watch on TV. It is wiped from existence, as surely as commissars in the USSR wiped events from existence. Thankfully, people are out there making films like these.